FTC orders DoNotPay's 'world's first robot lawyer' to pay $193,000 and notify subscribers over unsubstantiated AI claims

The problem

DoNotPay sold an online subscription — “$36 every two months” at times relevant to the FTC’s complaint — that it advertised as “the world’s first robot lawyer,” “capable of suing anyone at the press of a button.” Through a chatbot, subscribers would submit prompts to an AI that “purportedly operated like a human lawyer”: drafting demand letters, initiating small-claims cases, and detecting legal violations on business websites. The donotpay.com site even featured an endorsement attributed to The Los Angeles Times which, per the FTC’s complaint, “derives from a high-schooler’s opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times’ High School Insider website, a user-generated content platform for young people.”

What the regulator found

In September 2024, as part of its Operation AI Comply sweep, the FTC issued an administrative complaint alleging the service could not deliver: “DoNotPay did not test whether the Service’s law-related features operated like a human lawyer,” and the company “has not employed attorneys and has not retained attorneys, let alone attorneys with the relevant legal expertise,” to test the quality and accuracy of those features. The complaint states the service was built on technologies that included a natural-language-processing model, chatbot software, and an API with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, none “trained on a comprehensive and current corpus of federal and state laws, regulations, and judicial decisions.” A website-diagnostics feature advertised as detecting violations that could cost a consumer “$125,000 in legal fees” “did not, in fact, analyze a consumer’s small business website for hundreds of federal and state law violations based solely on an email address.”

These are settled allegations: DoNotPay “neither admits nor denies any of the allegations in the Complaint.” A company spokesperson told Ars Technica DoNotPay “is pleased to have worked constructively with the FTC to settle this case and fully resolve these issues, without admitting liability,” characterizing the complaint as relating to “a few hundred customers some years ago (out of millions of people), with services that have long been discontinued” — the company’s own unverified characterization, carried here only as its reply.

The outcome

After a 30-day public comment period (five comments received), the Commission voted 5-0 on January 16, 2025 to approve the final order. The Decision and Order (Docket No. C-4812, issued January 14, 2025; announced February 11, 2025) requires DoNotPay to:

• Pay $193,000.00 to the Commission within 30 days — “monetary relief” in the FTC’s words, not a fine or civil penalty; the order provides the money may fund consumer redress;
• Notify every new 2021–2023 subscriber by email, in fixed language: “Unless we have sufficient evidence to back up our claims, we can’t advertise that DoNotPay acts like a real lawyer by, for example, writing legal demand letters, filing cases in small claims court, or giving legal advice”;
• Stop the claims: no representation that a covered product “operates like a human lawyer” — or performs any professional service like a professional in the relevant field — without competent and reliable evidence to substantiate it.

Every figure above originates with the independent regulator in a signed public order and its own complaint and releases — not with the company whose AI claims were at issue. For TIN’s thesis it is the canonical counter-example: an AI capability claim with no testing and no qualified reviewers behind it carried a $193,000 price tag plus a mandated corrective email to three years of subscribers.

Path to green

The figures are already established by the signed order. The human step is (1) FTC Office of Public Affairs confirming on record that order C-4812 remains final and unmodified and whether the $193,000 was paid; and (2) a DoNotPay right-of-reply beyond its September 2024 statement to Ars Technica. Free upgrades on the same docket: the case timeline page, the letters-to-commenters PDF, and both commissioners’ concurring statements.